landscapes—we make them.”     

       Heming was attached to a battery whose Major was noted for his “guts". He either made or broke his officers in the first week that they were with him. He didn’t have to wait long to be put to the test. The whole of our brigade was crowded into the narrow valley, know as Mash Valley, which parallels the road which runs along the ridge from Albert to Pozihres. It was a direct enfilade for the Hun. The batteries were strung throughout the length of the valley at about two-hundred—yard intervals, so that when we weren’t being pounded by the enemy, we were being       wounded by prematures from the friendly guns behind us. When a strafe was on, it was as though two contending gales had met above our heads and were pushing against each other breast to breast. In those days we made landscapes at a tremendous rate. There met at the Somme the most ingenious artists in the science of destruction which the world had seen till that date. They found a pleasant country of windmills, snuggling woods, villages with tall, clear spires, nests of embowered greenness upheld by hills against the sky, and they trampled it with shells into dust and mixed the dust with tire blood of men, till as far as eye could stretch it       was a putrescent sea of mud.     

       In the first week of September 1916, when we crept into our positions under the heavy morning mist, the clay was baked to the brittle hardness of pottery; two months earlier the rains and carnage had washed away all signs of friendliness and greenness. Hands, heads and stockinged feet of the dead stuck out where the mud had dried up; one tripped over them and, at touching them, shrank back with a thrill of horror. It was a good place from many points of view to test a man’s capacity for “guts". It was especially good at night, for directly darkness had fallen the Hun drenched the length and breadth of the valley with gas-shells You could hear them coming over with a whistling sound, like an army of wild geese. You waited for the explosions and, when you heard nothing but stealthy thuds, you knew that it was time to run along the gun-pits and give the alarm for the wearing of gas-helmets. The helmets with which we were issued in those days were rather horrid affairs. They were like gray flannel shirts drenched in treacle and sewn up at the top so that you could not push your head through. You pulled them on and tucked the shirts in under the collar of your tunic. Then you shoved a rubber 

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